Before social media, Chef Baba Benedicto was quietly selling from home. One customer at a weekend bazaar led to her first big break.
Before Nono’s Comfort Kitchen became a beloved name for comfort food in the Philippines, Chef Baba Benedicto was simply baking pastries at home. It was the late ’90s, and social media didn’t exist—so she did what many early food entrepreneurs did: sell at weekend bazaars.
“I started my business in 1999. You could say I was one of those home sellers before social media,” she shares. “I used to join bazaars like Salcedo Market and Legaspi Market on weekends. Initially, it was just orders from home.”
Armed with skills from the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco and a year’s experience working in a pastry shop in the U.S., Baba returned to Manila with a passion for desserts and a hands-on approach to business. She had no storefront, no digital marketing—just great pastries and word of mouth.
Then came the moment that would change her career trajectory: a can of almond crunch.
“Someone bought a can of our almond crunch… They liked it so much that they gave it to their R&D department,” Baba recalls.
That customer happened to be connected with Selecta, one of the biggest ice cream brands in the Philippines. Selecta’s R&D team loved the almond crunch—a mix of caramel, almonds, and chocolate—and reached out to Baba. They wanted to use it as a component for a limited-edition ice cream flavor.
That unexpected call turned into a formal collaboration, forcing Baba to level up from home-based operations. “That forced me to move out of my mom’s house and set up my own commissary,” she says. “So that was my big break.”
The Selecta project may have been a limited engagement, but it gave Baba something far more valuable: infrastructure. With a commissary in place, she began supplying coffee shops and eventually opened her own pastry shop, Classic Confections, in Greenbelt 5 in 2007.
From a single almond crunch order to full-scale production, Baba’s story is a masterclass in recognizing opportunity and being ready to scale—even when it comes unexpectedly.
Today, Baba co-owns multiple branches of Nono’s and continues to build on the foundation she laid with Classic Confections. But it all started with a single sale, at a single stall, in a weekend bazaar.
This article includes quotes from an interview originally published by Esquire Philippines, authored by Henry Ong.
